DYNAMITE The inventor of dynamite was a man named Alfred Nobel. He was born in Sweden in 1833.

In childhood, his family had travelled extensively through Europe and he had learnt several languages. But at the age of 18, Nobel moved to the United States of America to study chemistry and spent four years there. When his fathers family business collapsed, Alfred devoted his studies to the manufacture, use and safe detonation of explosives and through trial and terrible error, he came upon the single explosive that, even though its outdated today, was used extensively for the next century that and we call it the dynamite! The 18th but increasingly the 19th century, were the boom-years of the Industrial Revolution. Literally. A lot of things were going Boom in the 1800s. The transcontinental railroad across the USA was being built, in Australia and California, gold-rushes were driving people crazy trying to get rich. In Seuz, a great canal was being dug through the earth. In England, Londons famous Underground railroad system was being built. But for all this to be possiblefor all the tunneling, blasting, mining, trenching, dredging and excavation to be made possible explosives were needed. To chip away at rock for hours was not effective when you could blast the rock apart and then just simply carry away the leftover pieces. And there were two main explosives in the mid-19th century, Black powder and Nitroglycerine. Black powder had been used since the 1600s for construction-work and mining. People drilled holes into rocks, filled them with black powder, trailed a fuse, lit it and let the explosion do its work. But black powder was relatively weak. It was designed for use firing rifles, cannons, pistols and muskets and not blasting holes in rocks. This had to be replaced with something more effective. That more effective something was invented in 1847 by an Italian chemist named Ascanio Sobrero. Although he was actually trying to create a medicine at the time but he had unintentionally invented an oily, liquid explosive which he called nitroglycerine. Nitroglycerine has an explosive power eight times stronger than that of the black powder and people were quick to see that this could blast and tunnel and mine and build a lot more effectively than old-fashioned gunpowder. However, there was a problem. Nitroglycerine is notoriously and lethally unstable. Because it is a contact-explosive which explodes from sufficient agitation, the slightest shock, bump or jolt can cause it to blow up. Because of this, using, and even more, transporting, nitroglycerine was extremely dangerous. For nitroglycerine to be used in construction of major engineering projects, it was necessary to have a chemist on-site to mix the concoction for you, then and there, when you needed it. Transporting nitroglycerine to a constructionsite by a bumpy, jolty, shaky and vibrating horse and cart would be a disaster. The biggest problem, apart

from this, was nitroglycerines unpredictable nature. People knew it was unstable so a safer explosive had to be found. Something that could be safely transported safely carried, safely detonated without the risk of exploding unexpectedly. Nitroglycerine if used properly, could speed up construction-work on major public-works projects, it could allow people to mine faster and more effectively or blast and split rocks apart for quarrying that much easier. But its unpredictable nature meant that it was very hard to use it properly. Anyone who handled nitroglycerine was in deadly danger of being blown to pieces. It was to prevent this and to make nitroglycerine easier to use, that Alfred Nobel invented his blasting-cap. Before Nobel, people detonated nitroglycerine in two ways. One way to detonate nitroglycerine, as many people knewwas just to give it a shake. Enough agitation and nitroglycerine would explode. But nobody really knew just how much agitation it required. And to agitate the mixture, they needed to be near to it. And nobody wanted to be next to nitroglycerine when it exploded. The other way for nitroglycerine to be detonated was to pour it onto a surfacelay a fuselight itand run. The problem with this is, one stray spark could set off the mixture early and send you flying into the air. Clearly, there were a few work-related dangers to using nitroglycerine. Alfred Nobel examined nitroglycerine and decided to try and combine these two methods of detonating nitroglycerine. He recognized that sufficient agitation would cause it to explode. And he also recognized the danger of an open flame or an unpredictable fuse. To try and make this safer, Nobel created his blasting-caps. Nobels blasting-caps were simple, really. They used mercury fulminate to create a chain-reaction. Exploding a small amount of mercury fulminate in a metal precussion-cap produced enough of a shock to detonate any nearby nitroglycerine. Nobels invention made it easier and safer to detonate nitroglycerine without the need to be connected to the nitroglycerine and without the need for open flames from fuses or matches. Dynamite was finally invented in 1866 when Nobel discovered a substance that would, at the same time bind nitroglycerine together so that it didnt have to be transported as a liquid in fragile glass bottles, and which would render the explosive harmless until it was ready to be used This substance was in a wayearth! Or to be precise, it was diatomaceous earth, also called diatomite, a special type of soft soil a bit like sand. Among its other properties, this earth was very absorbent and was therefore wonderful for mixing with nitroglycerine. To transport nitroglycerine safely, bottles and jars of the stuff were packed into crates and the hollows between the jars were filled with diatomite sand, to cushion the jolting of transportation. When workers were unloading some nitroglycerine near Nobels factory one day, they accidently dropped one of the crates! Fearing for their lives, the men ran away! When the cate did not explode, they returned to inspect the damage, which was minimal. Some of the lower jars had broken from the impact, but the sand had done its job and prevented an explosion. Nobel, searching for a substance to add to nitroglycerine to render it harmless until the time of planned detonation, examined the sand used in packing the nitroglycerine. He experimented with the nitro-infused sand and discovered that if the

mixture had a fuse or blasting-cap applied to it, it would detonate, but was otherwise rendered inexplosive due to the sand mixed in with the liquid nitroglycerine. After further experiments, Nobel had created what he initially called Nobels Blasting Powder in 1867. His powder was created out of a ratio of 3:1 of nitroglycerine to diatomite sand. At last, people had a safe explosive that was as powerful as nitroglycerine but which had none of the instability. The liquid nitroglycerine was mixed in with the earth and the resulting paste was formed into sticks which were wrapped in waxed paper. Using dynamite was as easy as inserting a blasting-cap into the end of the stick of dynamite, trailing away a fuse and then lighting it. The fuse would eventually set off the blasting-cap which would set off the dynamite. Nobels new invention was a success. Nitroglycerine could now be used safely, although for added protection, sticks of dynamite were often frozen solid in transportation as an extra preventive against accidental explosions. The name Dynamite comes from the greek word for Power. Dynamite was fantastically popular. Finally, construction-workers and builders and engineers had a powerful and safe explosive. Of course, Dynamite wasnt always used for peaceful purposes such as construction and public works. Dynamite, as an all-purpose explosive, was easy to buy. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the availability of dynamite meant that it was used for several murder and assassination-plots. One of the most famous was in 1880, when a carpenter planted dynamite under a dining-room in the Winter Palace in Russia, intent on killing Tsar Alexander II. The assassination was a failure, but it showed just how accessible high explosives could be, to the wrong kind of person. We know that the Nobel Prizes are awarded each year, to those who have made outstanding achievements in the areas of Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Medicine and most famously of all, world peace; the famous Nobel Peace Prize. The prizes were created as a direct result of the unpredicted and disastrous consequences that Alfred Nobel had created with his invention: Dynamite. What had been created to help mankind build and construct and advance society, was also being used to destroy it! Disturbed by this and troubled by the kind of legacy that he might leave on the world, Nobel instructed in his last will that his fortune was to be used to create a series of prizes to be given to those people who conferred the greatest benefit to mankind in the categories Physics, Chemistry, Physiology and Medicine, Literature and World Peace. Nobel died in December, 1896 at the age of 63.